A police state: Police standing outside the trial of legal activist Cu Huy Ha Vu, April 2011.
(source unknown)
As written in
the first part, “more than anyone else, the Communist Party – herein
represented by the propagandists and public security machinery – is aware of
the power of secrecy. Transparency only means self-defamation and suicide.”
Therefore it is crucial to ensure secrecy in a variety of areas, ranging from work
secret to national security. This can be done via the implementation of a basic
principle, that is “to do good in propaganda of the communist ideology” and to
keep the press under tight surveillance.
With the
advent of the Internet and especially social media networks, however, the task
becomes more difficult. Given such context, the propaganda and public security
machinery must deal with controlling official media and, at the same time,
suppressing the unofficial one, ie. the Internet media.
Press cards
A
subtle measure taken by the Party to control the media in the name of “media
management” is to maintain the so-called “press card” (not press badges which
are issued to journalists covering a specific event). A Vietnamese press card
is granted by the Ministry of Information and Communication to a reporter only
when he/she meets a set of requirements imposed by a circular titled 07/2007/TT-BVHTT,
including “not to be rebuked in the previous 12 months” and “to be recommended
by the media agency, the line ministry, the Department of Culture and
Information and the Association of the Press.” All the requirements are hard to
meet, especially for reporters who tend to criticize the Party.
In
particular, the requirement that the reporter must be “recommended by the media
agency, the line ministry, the Department of Culture and Information and the
Association of the Press” manifests the vague boundary between the state sector
and civil society. The press per se is part of the realm of civil society, and
the media agency is not an agency performing official duties.
Accordingly,
the government is not entitled to grant press cards to identify those who work
in media area; in other words, it cannot make invention in an area beyond its jurisdiction.
However, the government in reality keeps exercising this authority, even
prescribes that “The media operating within the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
is the essential means of providing public information in relation to social
life; is the mouth piece of Party organizations, State bodies and social
organizations, and a forum for the people” (Article 1 on role and function of
the media, Vietnam’s Law on Media, 1999) and the media must “disseminate,
publicize and contribute to the establishment and protection of the strategies
and policies of the Party, the laws of the State, and the achievements of the
country and the world in accordance with the guiding principles and aims of
media organizations; to contribute to political stability” (Article 6 on the responsibilities
and rights of the media).
As a result,
a great many journalists are subject to the direction of the machinery of
government whose capacity of communication is decidedly inferior to theirs.
“Free journalist” = reactionary
element
Some may say
press card itself is no more than a card, thus it is of not much significance.
However, press cards are very important. A journalist is someone “who is
granted a press card” in law as well as in social perception. Those without
press cards are not recognized as journalists. Consequently, they will
evidently be barred from any event that the organizers, the police, and the
authorities, dislike the press to attend. “Press card bearing” is often
referred to as one condition for journalists who want to attend state-organized,
high level meetings. With this requirement, the organizers succeed in blocking
hundreds of reporters and, of course, bloggers.
More than
anyone else, the police insist that only those granted with press cards are
recognized as journalists and that those without press cards are just
“self-proclaimed” reporters or freelance writers who must not be given access
to “authorized information”. On October 30th 2012, Catholic blogger Huyền Trang
was detained and interrogated for nearly one day in a Ho Chi Minh City police
station. When she told the police that she worked as a reporter for
Redemptorist News, an online Catholic news service, they shouted at her, “Who
recognized you? Where is your press card? You all are a band of reactionary
parasites!”
In 2011 and
2012 alone, dozens of journalists reported being harassed or even assaulted by
the police, ruffians and even civilians. However, their denunciations and
complaints simply went ignored because they were not “journalists performing
duties” in the eyes of the authorities.
Being unrecognized may cause much more trouble to bloggers because they do not receive protection. Dieu Cay and Ta Phong Tan, the two members of the Free Journalist Club, were severely persecuted when they came to hot spots to report for their personal blog. Both were given harsh sentences in the end: 12 years of imprisonment for Dieu Cay and 10 years for Ta Phong Tan.
On the one
hand, the Party and the state tightly control official media. On the other
hand, they keep denying the existence of “citizen journalists”.
Both the
mainstream media and the blogosphere heard of Truong Duy Nhat, who quit his
journalistic career to become a blogger. He is now the owner of the blog “A
Different Viewpoint”. Following his arrest on May 26, 2013, journalist Duc
Hien (aka. Bo Cu Hung) commented on his FB page, “the thing is that a
journalist must be able to access information. If he or she lacks the ability
or opportunity to access information, his or her different viewpoint will be
either insults, or libels, or talking along the same line as someone else…”
Ironically
while political bloggers harshly criticized Hien, he was right from the
viewpoint of the authorities. The ability and opportunity to access information
remain a huge difference between a journalist and a blogger, or a
state-recognized journalist and an independent (free) one. There is no way for
a blogger to attend major social or political state-organized events and
gatherings, international and national conferences, or to interview high ranking
officials of the Party and the government.
The authorities
are fully aware that they must employ this disadvantage of the bloggers to keep
them in the disadvantageous position to the press. At the same time, they
deliberately create an invisible war between “right side” and “left side” media
to curb any form of cooperation between state-owned and citizen journalists.
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Previous part
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Note:
Le Doan Hop, in his office tenure, said in an interview given to the
Sai Gon Giai Phong on August 3, 2007, “You the press are absolutely
free if you keep to the right side of the road, and we are making
efforts to
keep you, comrades, on the right side.” Possibly from that time on,
Hop’s concepts of “right
side” and “left side” in media gave rise to a famous metaphor, “right
side
press” to mean state-owned newspapers as opposed to “left side press” to
mean “reactionary”,
out-of-state-control blogs.
Previous part
